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Saturday, January 24, 2015

MundiMuster! Save Urban Studies at SFAI: Sign and Share the Letter

Since 2012, many concerns have been raised by faculty,
students, staff, alumni, and supporters about a lack of transparency and
accountability in the key decision making processes undertaken by the
administration of the San Francisco Art Institute. The quite sudden
recent suspension of the Urban Studies program seems to be yet another
stunning confirmation of these worries.

To say that this decision has been more opaque than
transparent is an understatement: Few of the actual stakeholders to such
a momentous change at SFAI were aware that it was even under
consideration until a public e-mail announced that the decision and the
process justifying it had already concluded.

A review of the program is said to have taken place in the
Spring of 2014, but few faculty or students involved in the actual
program seem to have participated in either the review or the
decision-making process. The timing of this review coincided with the
absence of key figures in and champions of the program, and the results
of the process are at odds with the results of other recent and ongoing
review processes that involved wider participation of the relevant
stakeholders.

While program changes ultimately depend on the Dean, they
are supposed to be addressed in the Faculty Senate. The Urban Studies
program was not suspended after a discussion or with a consenting vote
of the Faculty Senate.

Dean Schreiber recently commented that Urban Studies does
not offer a “robust experience” for students. In the absence of a
definition of terms this judgment is hard to gauge, but it is difficult
to understand how the accompanying proposal of a BFA with an urban focus
more centered on studio classes than interdisciplinary courses could
possibly be more robust on any definition. Re-assigning our
institutional engagement with urban questions to studio classes will
inevitably introduce fissures in the theoretical formulation of the
urbanity in question. This envisioned change is also countering the
current trend of expanding Urban Studies Master’s programs across the
country’s academic institutions.

Indeed, a host of courses directly taking up historical
and theoretical questions of post-colonial pan-urbanity, environmental
sustainability, urban poverty, street protests, immigrant
communities―many of them focusing on urban movements in San Francisco in
particular and taught for years by activists and participants in the
movements themselves―such as Laura Fantone, and the renowned local
historian Chris Carlsson―are vanishing from the 2015 curriculum. The
loss of these engagements and the silence of these voices wounds our
Institute. Far from a minor shift in focus these changes can only be
understood as a radical dis-engagement with the urban as a real priority
at SFAI.

As recently as SFAI’s Strategic Plan for 2013, the
President and the Board of Trustees declared that “SFAI will strive to
further improve its operations and heighten its ambitions in the service
of art, artists, and the Bay Area community.” The decision to suspend
Urban Studies contradicts SFAI’s long-held commitment to connect our
students to the City and the greater Bay Area artistic community of
which we are a part.

The San Francisco Art Institute is a school sited at the
thriving heart of a world-historical city. We live and teach and create
and connect in the midst of the urgent distress of artist and gallery
evictions, in the scrum of venture capitalism’s “disruptions” of public
goods and public services, in the face of the Silicon Valley steamroller
of reductive tech-talk, in the creative ferment of street protest, all
right here, all right now. In such a place and at such a time, at the
very moment when other art schools and art programs are taking up the
urban with renewed energy and vigor as an indispensable motor of
convivial creativity and transformative imagination, it is difficult
indeed to understand what considerations have driven this rash decision
to suspend an already established and accomplished program here.